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Ask Slashdot: How To Get Non-Developers To Send Meaningful Bug Reports?

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-broken-just-fix-it dept.

DemonGenius writes "I'm in the midst of a major rollout of one of our primary internal applications at work and we have a beta version available for all the staff to use. The problem here is most of the staff don't know how to send reports meaningful enough to get us devs started on solving their problems without constant back and forth correspondence that wastes both developer time and theirs. Some common examples are: screenshots of the YSOD that don't include the page URL, scaled screenshots that are unreadable, the complaint that wants to be a bug report but is still just a complaint, etc. From the user's perspective, they just send an email, but that email registers in our tracking system. Any thoughts on how to get the non-devs sending us descriptive and/or meaningful reports? Does anyone here have an efficient and user-friendly bug tracking system/policy/standard at their workplace? How does it work?"

5 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Make it send data to you by jhoegl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Make your software send it...

    You can not teach the world, so why try?

    1. Re:Make it send data to you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Just gunna point out that I regularly have to post meaningful bug reports for a lot of the important software I (and probably you) use every day. I wouldn't say the people that made it failed.

      What they do get wrong is using the bug reporting systems like bugzilla. I look at the pages for those kinds of system and feel like I'm going to have a heart attack. And I'm the guy that could write it.

    2. Re:Make it send data to you by werdnapk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, a crash report can be sent by an application, but a non-crashing bug? If the bug isn't caught by tests (automated or manual) then the software won't know to send an issue like that, otherwise it wouldn't have been a bug in the first place.

  2. More pressing question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A more pressing question is how to get developers to stop ignoring bug reports.

    1. Re:More pressing question by WeirdAlchemy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This. In my experience, dealing with bugs is very much a two-way street. If you want users to submit better bug reports, you need to be responsive to them so that they feel like they're getting something out of it. Imagine yourself as a user who takes the time to prepare a nice bug report, then waits a month to see any progress. How much time are you going to spend on your next bug report? Either way you behave, it ends up as a feedback loop -- your choice whether it's a positive of negative one.